David Fincher Reveals How His Netflix Show 'Mindhunter' Toys With Serial Killer History

David Fincher has an undeniable interest in serial killers. From Seven to Zodiac to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the director has focused much of his work on why human beings kill. It’s not surprising, then, that Fincher’s latest endeavor is a TV series centered on the creation of criminal psychology and profiling inside the FBI. The show, Mindhunter, premieres on Netflix on October 13 and looks at how several real-life FBI agents used interviews with serial killers to better solve ongoing cases.

The series, the idea for which was brought to Fincher by Charlize Theron, is based on a book called Mind Hunter: Inside The FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit, written by FBI agents Mark Olshaker and John E. Douglas. However, in order to make the story work for television Fincher asked screenwriter Joe Penhall to take some serious dramatic liberties.

"He came in and we talked about what it could be and he went away and came in with a pitch that was pretty much the only way to do this," Fincher said at a talk during the London Film Festival. "Which is to dramatize the time and the place and the crater that was created by this new thinking. If we stayed religiously to the chronology and called everybody by their real names and tried to get the life rights -- it was an inordinately complex bowl of spaghetti to unwind."

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For that reason Mark Olshaker and John E. Douglas are not characters in Mindhunter. Instead, Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany play fictional agents in the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, both only loosely based on Olshaker and Douglas. The series is set in 1979, but time is compressed, accelerating to get right into the action of the characters interviewing imprisoned serial killers. "This was an approach to really excavate the idea of a particular moment in time, which probably took eight years [in real life]," Fincher noted. "In the first two episodes they begin to get on their feet. [Joe]’s notion was correct: We can’t be bootstrapped to the footnotes. We have to be able to show the audience what they need to see when they need to see it in order to understand."

The killers represented on the series are, generally, based in reality. The first several episodes include interviews with Edmund Kemper, a serial killer who murdered his grandparents, mother and several young women in the 1970s. Douglas interviewed him in a California prison, where he is still serving several life sentences, and those conversations are reenacted for the purpose of the narrative in Mindhunter. Charles Manson and the Son of Sam are also included. These actual criminals, who existed in the public consciousness around the same time as Watergate, are a way for Fincher to look at the historic development of the FBI and criminal profiling in the context of a fictionalize tale.

"They realized they didn’t understand modern-day criminality," Fincher said. "Out of the basement grew this program of trying to sit with the most depraved minds that you could find to have them explain ‘What was going through your head?’ You had to acknowledge that your enemy was human and there were things about him we didn’t understand, but if you could empathize with him he might let you in on it. That was an interesting notion. That was intriguing to me."

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Mindhunter is not really about the murders or the crimes, though. It leans less on violence and gore and more on discussions of human behavior. Many of the crimes are revealed only through crime scene photographers, rather than actual scenes, and that’s because Fincher wants the show to be all about the people. It’s a lesson he said he learned from making Zodiac, and may explain why the show needed to fictionalize some things.

"Mindhunter is about characters and what they want and where they were when this new bomb was dropped, this idea of serial killer profiling," Fincher said. "Trying to understand people’s motivations and signatures through the details they leave behind that they’re subconsciously unaware of. It’s much more character-based and much more about how these guys talk to each other [than Zodiac]. And what they reveal in these intimate conversations."

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The series is already renewed for a second season, although Fincher hasn’t said much about that yet. He did say that, for him, the best scripts leave clues along the way the lead up to an inevitable ending. Like in Seven, the finale of a story should leave the viewer feeling like there was no other possible place to go.

"It makes a bigger sense at the end," Fincher noted. It’s something to keep in mind as you binge through the first set of episodes, which the director said showcase "good, clean, wholesome, family values."

And, of course, blame Fincher if you can’t sleep at night thinking of killers like Ed Kemper.

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Emily Zemler is a freelance writer and journalist based in London. You can follow her on Twitter @emilyzemler.

John David Washington on 'BlacKkKlansman' And Why He Doesn't Rehearse with His Famous Dad

John David Washington first appeared in a Spike Lee movie when he was just a little kid. At the very end of Malcolm X -- which stars his father, Denzel -- he stands up and declares, "I'm Malcolm X." He is one of a number of children who do so in Lee's conclusion to the epically scaled biography, one that zooms out of the Civil Rights activist’s life and into a modern Harlem classroom at its end.

Now, 26 years later, the younger Washington is the lead in another real-life drama from the director. It's BlacKkKlansman, the surreal story of Ron Stallworth, a black detective in Colorado Springs who became a member of the KKK during an undercover investigation. Wait, how? In Lee's film, we see how Stallworth chats up members of the hate group -- including David Duke (Topher Grace) -- on the phone, endearing himself to them, before sending in another, white officer to their meetings (Adam Driver). As Stallworth, Washington both grimly endures the racist vitriol and finds perverse humor in essentially pulling off the ultimate prank. See, for instance, the scene in which he comes face to face with Duke -- and gets him to pose for a photo.

And while it’s not his debut -- Washington, who was in the NFL, also appears on HBO’s Ballers-- BlacKkKlansman suggests that the 34-year-old can go toe-to-toe with the greatest living actors, including his dad.

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Inside North Nashville’s Thriving Arts District

Thrillist and Chase Sapphire® are working together to create “Tastes Worth Traveling For,” a content series pointing savvy urban explorers to the best places to eat, drink, and have a good time. And after you've taken in all that North Nashville's art scene has to offer, check out Sapphire On Location for inspiration on where to explore next.

A walk down Buchanan Street, which cuts through the center of North Nashville, brings you past hot new pizza joint Slim & Husky’s, street bikers, luxury leather goods stores, a skateboard shop, a Southern-style vegan restaurant, and a buzzy art gallery. Cut north up to Clarksville Pike, and you’ll pass two huge murals and a car wash that serves Caribbean food.

It’s safe to say we’re not among the neon lights, honky tonks, and rooftop patios of Broadway anymore.

Loosely defined as the area above Jefferson Street bounded by the Cumberland River to the north and east, North Nashville represents both the city’s cultural past -- and a growing presence of new gallery owners, muralists, and other artists that demands attention. While its crisp new business-fronts are easily recognizable, the less obvious information, North Nashville’s history, is the area’s true gift to visitors of Music City.

And for that, it’s best to go to the source. While exploring the neighborhood’s galleries, murals, and design shops, ask a question about its olden days, and you’ll be sent to Ed’s Fish House (open since 1972). For queries about Buchanan Street's evolution, you may get directed to Bud’s Hardware & Key Shop (est. 1953). But until you can make it down (or up, or over) to North Nashville, here’s what else you should know to get the most out of a visit to this dynamic art scene.

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The Ending of 'The Meg' Is the Best Part of This Overstuffed Shark Thriller

This post contains spoilers for The Meg, and discusses the ending of the movie in detail.

Scale is The Meg's greatest asset and, ultimately, its downfall. The Jason Statham-starringsea creature thriller, which splashes into theaters this weekend after a decade-long development process and a summer of hype, wants to be the biggest, loudest, and priciest shark movie ever made. In shark movie terms, it makes Deep Blue Sea look like Open Water. But in pursuit of great size, it makes a fatal mistake: It saves its best material for its ludicrous finale and bites off more than it can chew.

Still, what an ending! But until we get there, The Meg spends a frustrating amount of time setting up a plot that's as shallow as a kiddie pool. Statham plays Jonas Taylor, an expert diver recruited to rescue his ex-wife and a team of scientists trapped in their fancy underwater vehicle after a mysterious force causes them to lose contact with the home base. He gets the job done, but meets an old nemesis along the way: a 90 foot super-shark known as a "Megalodon" that was thought to be extinct. Now, it's time to rumble.

But director Jon Turteltaub, the filmmaker behind similarly proudly ridiculous National Treasure movies, stages most of the man and shark conflicts out in the water and away from land. There's one dynamite sequence, thankfully filmed in broad daylight to keep the action clear, that involves Statham attempting to poison the shark and getting yanked like a body-surfing Ken doll for his troubles. But none of this captures the queasy tension and sense of shared public terror that the best shark movies evoke.